About me

Beware iCal and the word "monthly"

I noticed today that I'd missed an important due date. Cue internal dialogue:

"But I have that in iCal!""Well, that doesn't do any good if you ignore the alarms!""But I didn't! I didn't ignore the alarm, it never went off! Honest!"

A little investigation revealed that I was right. Er, I mean, the alarm never went off.

Let's say you want to be warned of something on a monthly basis, near the end of the month. You might create an event, set it to repeat "monthly," and walk away, satisfied.

But you, if you were really me, would be wrong. Say, for example, that you create the event on July 31. You'd get the alarm in August, but not in September. You'd wake up some random morning in October and discover that you'd completely failed to remember this recurring activity.

Why? Because iCal thinks that by "monthly," instead of, you know, once a month, you mean "every time there's a 31 on the calendar" - or roughly 7 times a year.

I suppose this is a situation where the thing I wanted - "do this near the end of each month" - does not easily translate. I re-formulated it as a custom repeat, going off on the last Tuesday every month, which is close enough for my purposes.